Portland critics find much to praise in the new Seattle Art Museum

Two of the most discerning reviews of the new Seattle Art Museum, which opened over the weekend, come from critics D.K. Row and Randy Gragg, both writing for the Oregonian. Gragg, the dean of Northwest architecture critics, calls the design by Portland architect Brad Cloepfil a "brilliant remodel," especially for the interaction between the old SAM, a post-modernist melange by Robert Venturi in 1991, and the new SAM, with its more modernist austerity of form. In working out these complex harmonies, Gragg writes, each building gets "wonderfully freed" from its theories, producing an exciting "duet" of old and new. Gragg also recounts the scheme for each floor, with four interlocking room structures with different qualities of light and ceiling heights that give curators lots of choices. He worries, though, that as this scheme is repeated on each subsequent floor above as the museum expands, it will seem too "relentless." D.K. Row looks at the way the enlarged collection is displayed and finds "strikingly imaginative" narratives in the contrasting displays, some of which are subversive and off-hand, some of which release streams of ideas. He admires lots of the new art that the curators have to work with, particularly contemporary American work of a high order. But what really impresses him is the intelligence of the juxtapositions in the display, where SAM truly becomes greater than the sum of its parts.